2006 CONFERENCE THEME:

Catholic Social Teaching
and Human Work
25th Anniversary of Laborem Exercens

September 25-27, 2006

Confirmed Speakers

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin
Archbishop of Dublin, Ireland. He entered the service of the Holy See in 1976 in the Pontifical Council for the Family. In 1994 he was appointed Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

Archbishop Martin has written and spoken widely on the topic of Church’s social teaching at conferences organized by the Bishops Conferences of the United States, of Australia, of Peru, of Scotland, and by the Council of Latin American Episcopates (CELAM), the Federation of Asian Bishops Conferences (FABC), and the Commission of the Episcopates of the European Union (COMECE).

In March 2001 he was elevated to the rank of Archbishop and undertook responsibilities as Permanent Observer of the Holy See in Geneva, at the United Nations Office and Specialised Agencies and at the World Trade Organisation. He led the delegations of the Holy See to the Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organisation (Doha, 2001), the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.

TOPIC:
"Catholic Social Teaching and Human Work"

Bishop John Manz
Bishop Manz was ordained to the priesthood in 1971, and served as associate pastor of both Providence of God and St. Roman parishes and most recently as pastor of St. Agnes of Bohemia in Chicago. He presently serves as Vicar for Vicariate III in the Archdiocese of Chicago and on USCCB Committee for Migration and Refugee Services, and chairs the Church in Latin America committee.

TOPIC:
"Catholic Social Teaching and Migrant Workers"

Frances Fox-Piven
Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology Graduate School and University Center, CUNY. Her Regulating the Poor, co-authored with Richard Cloward, is a landmark historical and theoretical analysis of the role of welfare policy in the economic and political control of the poor and working class. First published in 1972 and updated in 1993, it is widely acknowledged as a social science classic. She also co-authored Poor Peoples' Movements (1977) which analyzes the political dynamics through which insurgent social movements sometimes compel significant policy reforms. Piven and Cloward's The New Class War (1982, updated 1985), The Mean Season (1987), and The Breaking of the American Social Compact (1997) traced the historical and political underpinnings of the contemporary attack on social and regulatory policy. In Why Americans Don't Vote (1988; updated as Why Americans Still Don't Vote in 2000) they analyzed the role of electoral laws and practices in disenfranchising large numbers of working class and poor citizens, and the impact of disenfranchisement on party development.

In 1995 she was the first recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Political Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association; in 1998 she received the Mary Lepper Award from the Women's Caucus of the American Political Science Association. And in 2000 she received the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology.

TOPIC:
"The Campaign to Roll Back American Social Programs"

Christine Firer Hinze
Christine Firer Hinze is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics in the Department of Theology, Marquette University. She is the author of a book, Comprehending Power in Christian Social Ethics (Scholars 1995) and numerous articles on topics that include wage justice for women and families, work and welfare reform, and the relationship between social ethics and ecological concerns. She is a contributor to And God Saw That It Was Good: Catholic Theology and Ecology (USCC 1996) and has been a regular participant in Scholars' Consultations held by the US Catholic Conference's Environmental Justice Program.

TOPIC:
"An Finished Agenda: Women, Families and the Legacy of Laborem Exercens"

Thomas Kohler
Thomas Kohler is Professor of Law the Boston College School of Law. He writes extensively about domestic and comparative labor and employment law issues; mediating institutions; and theories of civil society and personhood. Among his most recent publications is the coauthored "Bonding and Flexibility: Employment Ordering in a Relationless Age," in the American Journal of Comparative Law.

TOPIC:
"The Relevance of Laborem Exercens for Workers"

Marvin Mich
Office of Social Policy and Research, Catholic Family Center, Rochester, NY. His latest book is Catholic Social Teaching and Movements by Twenty-Third Publications, (1998).

TOPIC:
"The Living Wage Movement and Catholic Social Teaching"

J. Russell Muirhead
Assistant Professor, Department of Government Harvard University. His teaching and research focus on contemporary debates about justice and the history of political thought. Muirhead received bachelor´s degrees from Harvard College and Balliol College at Oxford and earned his doctoral degree from Harvard University. He is the author of Just Work (Harvard University Press, 2004) and winner of the Roslyn Abramson Teaching Award at Harvard College.

During the 2005-2006 academic year, Muirhead will be a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, where he will be writing a book called "Left and Right: A Defense of Party Spirit." The book assesses the ways in which partisanship can be a defensible, even admirable, or, in contrast, a lamentable, even pathological, attribute of democratic citizens.

TOPIC: "The Promise of Fulfillment in the New World of Work"

Cordelia Reimers
Cordelia W. Reimers, professor of economics at Hunter College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York, has studied changes in the wage structure of ethnic and racial minority groups in the United States, especially African Americans and Mexican Americans. She completed a paper on "Unskilled Immigration and Changes in Wage Distribution of Black, Mexican American, and Non-Hispanic White Male Dropouts" and also wrote a chapter on "Compensation for the Latino Worker" for the National Council of La Raza's State of Hispanic America 1997.

In 1996-97 she was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and during the 1998-99 academic year was a Senior Economist at the Council Economic Advisors to the President.

TOPIC: "Working Parents, Childcare and Elder Care: Recent Trends and Policy Options"